SCUMMVM and MT32 Roland/Timidity Support


PokeParadox

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Has anyone had any luck configuring the Roland MT32 ROMs on Pandora's SCUMMVM?

I have this working on my Desktop and on my RaspberryPi, but I can't seem to get it working on Pandora.

I have Timidity installed and the ROMs for MT32 are correct.

Even without MT32 selecting Timidty does not appear to work either.

Anyone have any ideas?
 
I had to mess around a lot to get decent midi for my xbox scummvm setup recently. I read up about mt32 support and it seems to be very cpu intensive, hence it is deactivated for the xbox build.


I believe it is the same for the pandora builds. someone please correct me if I am wrong here though. would love to know if there is a build that supports mt32.
 
I have it installed but even standard midi won't play. 

Code:
WARNING: TiMidity: connect(): Connection refused!
WARNING: TiMidity: can't open control connection (host=127.0.0.1, port=7777)!
IMuse initialization - Unknown Error!
 
If the Amiga can do MT32 midi stuff in the Sierra games, etc then i don't see that the Pandora is any less powerful (as it emulates the Amiga quite well, we know that not to be the case). The Amiga didn't have a serial/midi dedicated co-processor that might have given it nearly CPU free midi support (of course Paula did that amongst other things but not a highly efficient dedicated implementation).
 
If the Amiga can do MT32 midi stuff in the Sierra games, etc
It didn't. Sierra converted the MT-32 tracks (real synth, 9 tracks, max. 32 voices) to sampled audio on 4 channels (also:4 tracks) which was "the Amiga way" (simplified).

It never synthesized anything, just played back samples sampled from the synthesizer.

There's a bit of interesting background you need to know in order to fully appreciate what MT32Emu does... It is wondeful. It is definitely not a sample player and essentially, if it were a bit more real time capable it would be a very usable software synthesizer (call it VSTi plugin if you will). Most MT32 emus always were dumb samplers (which was kinda the case for the amiga too...).

Gravis Ultrasound did the same, by the way: Each game had a different sample set you preloaded and yet it still did not sound 1:1 like an MT-32.

Not even Roland produced true MT-32 compatible sound cards later on (i.e. after the MT-32-based LAPC-1). Their SCC-1 had samples of the default MT-32 patches for MT-32 use. But that fails the moment a game starts modifying the patch.

There's a classical example of this: Ultima Underworld I. Already back in the late 90's a fellow I met said "MT-32 is crappy, cause on Ultima Underworld I, for example, when I walk it plays back the piano!". Did not, he was playing it on SCC-1 and assumed he was getting "the real audio" when in fact the sound designer for UW1 did a neat trick: he took the Piano patch, kept the sample/synth layer for the hammer, but removed the layer for the string hit by that hammer! So the damped hammer sounded like footsteps! SCC-1 ignored the patch alterations and just played unaltered piano, so of course it sounded stupid.

Music often sounded OKayish (not same, but comprehensible...), but in most games soundeffects were... well... broken to put it mildly...

And Sierra was actually one of the worst and best. Worst, because many of their tracks did so many things to that wonderful little black synth there was no way to emulate it with samples. Best, because it sounded heavenly on the real thing - often so real you really were not sure whether it was real or just a synth.

The MT-32 has all it's sample data in one of the ROM files (lightly compressed, unless I recall wrong) and both of them are tiny - most of the actual sound came from what can pretty much be called an early (first?-) digital virtual analog synth.

No way in the netherworld would a Motorola 68000 emulate the DSP put into the MT-32!

Now, the Pandora could, I wager, and quite trivially too... If Roland released the original algorithms they used in the 80's and those were converted to ARM assembly from whatever their custom DSP used :). It might not do much else at the same time though...

But as you probably guessed that "release" has not happened.

So even though the DSPs in the MT-32 are by now POS, without knowing exactly how they were programmed, getting a 1:1 sound out of your own algorithm is totally nontrivial.

Yet the MT32Emu project is trying to replicate the exact sound of MT-32 and LAPC-1! And their philosophy seems quite simple: must sound same, CPU be darned.

Example: LAPC-1 has a reverb that sounds kind of digitallymuddyandbelowaverage. In MT32Emu, last I looked, they used an impulse response reverb to simulate that. And a single impulse response reverb instance could pretty much bring, for example a Powerbook 1.6 GHz to it's knees... It is accurate, yes, but not light. It is literally the equivalent of buying a Ferrari and hiring a driver for the said Ferrari to tow a broken first batch WW beetle to it's destination, while you sit in that WW shouting "good times, mate, good times!".

The original algorithm Roland used is probably something beyond cheap in every aspect. The CPU used for the emulation if it really uses impulse responses is borderline ridiculous... But hey, on a Core i5, who notices?-)

Assuming they use the same philosophy on oscillators and filters... well, after compiling the mt32emu on the Pandora, trying an offline bounce of LSL theme .mid to audio and looking at the code I basically kind of stopped assuming Pyra would rid us of AdLib sounds...

So, on the Pandora, not going to happen without a serious rewrite of the mt32emu. And I very much doubt you can do that without altering the sound drastically - the mt32emu guys seem to know their business...
 
Has anyone had any luck configuring the Roland MT32 ROMs on Pandora's SCUMMVM?

I have this working on my Desktop and on my RaspberryPi, but I can't seem to get it working on Pandora.

I have Timidity installed and the ROMs for MT32 are correct.

Even without MT32 selecting Timidty does not appear to work either.

Anyone have any ideas?
Hmmm... rereading the first post before doing the wall of text thing should be mandatory for me...

But, as usual, I'm confused now: which is it you're trying to work on: SCUMMVMs MT32 emu or pushing the MIDI to timidity to be played back as somewhat-close simulation?

As far as I've understood the MT32 emu in SCUMMVM is basically same as in some versions of DOSbox and therefore same as earler version of the mt32emu project (MUNT), so it uses original MT-32 ROM files?

Timidity on the other hand, can load the samples and do some filtering etc. to them, but will have the broken sound effects I described:That should run on the Pandora, yes, but can it actually load MT32 ROMs as is?! I thought you feed something like SoundFonts to it as sample data?
 
At the moment I'm trying to do either or. 

I'm starting to think Timidity support has been broken, and no one has either confirmed or disproved this. Likewise I can't get the MT32 ROMs to work on the Pandora(work fine on SCUMMVM on RaspberryPi)

I would prefer to get the MT32 ROMs working as it really does sound magical as you described above! :)
 
Some time ago I tried converting MT-32 music in X-COM: UFO Defense and X-COM: Terror from the Deep to wave format on Pandora using munt 1.4.

Some songs required more time to convert than their length.

So Pandora doesn't have enough CPU power to play all MT-32 music.
 
If the Amiga can do MT32 midi stuff in the Sierra games, etc
It didn't. Sierra converted the MT-32 tracks (real synth, 9 tracks, max. 32 voices) to sampled audio on 4 channels (also:4 tracks) which was "the Amiga way" (simplified).

It never synthesized anything, just played back samples sampled from the synthesizer.
Really?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MT-32-compatible_computer_games#Commodore_Amiga

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=57816
 
Last edited by a moderator:
If the Amiga can do MT32 midi stuff in the Sierra games, etc
It didn't. Sierra converted the MT-32 tracks (real synth, 9 tracks, max. 32 voices) to sampled audio on 4 channels (also:4 tracks) which was "the Amiga way" (simplified).

It never synthesized anything, just played back samples sampled from the synthesizer.
Really?
Well, you probably know it but that's a totally different thing and is definitely not synthesizing anything at all anymore.

I was talking about producing the MT-32 sound without the actual desktop synth! And that the Amiga never did... anyway, the CPU drain for simply dumping the MIDI stream to the MIDI port was likely a lot less than even playing those 4 channels of digital audio from the Amiga itself... Of course, if you didn't own an MT-32 you had a mute game then :).

But of course, the Pandora can do that trivially and support for that exists at least in DOSBox no problem: just hook up a MIDI interface to USB and an MT-32 to that... Not very portable though, since you could fit like... ummm... 8 Pandoras into the MT-32 case, not to mention power...
 
PokeParadox: I don't know why Timidity option would fail, that should be feasible on the Pandora... I might try it myself at some point for games with GM support. Though the last time I gamed GM games (I think it was Discworld 1) I actually used something called Nemesys Gigasampler for it and I assure you: it was kickass :).

If I were you I would first check sequencer output has simply not been disabled for the PND for some reason... I'm on Slackware, and do not use PNDs, so my testing would probably not help assuming you're on Pandora's default OS (and knowing you already got that up on a Pi, so you know what you're up to)...

But true emulated MT-32 really is out of the processing capabilities of the Pandora like M-HT also confirmed:

Offline bounces of MT-32 audio take more time than the track itself, so realtime audio is not feasible - it was the same result I got from my Leisure Suit Larry (that's the LSL I mention above) theme test...

Personally, I've recently seriously considered getting rid of my "metal" DOSBox simply because DOSBox + MUNT are now good enough for gaming and far more/equally convenient... I get kind of nostalgic booting TheBox, but compared to my laptop the advantages are quite minimal... and emulation has more and more important advantages... The Pandora has been a bit of a nail in the coffin as it does older DOS titles spot on. And I'm almost hoping the Pyra will prove to be the Stake to Heart...

By the way, due to the wide range of CPU speed requirements of DOS games it isn't smooth sailing to play DOS titles "on iron" either: I need to disable caches from BIOS and run things like MO'SLO for a lot of games. Then when I accidentally boot it to Windows 95 (for a bit of TopGun-FireAtWill :) when slowed down I can make a meal and watch TV before it hits the desktop (assuming I don't just power it off...).

With me being an old fart DOS itself poses no problem and I got all the software and utils I need stashed on floppy disk images from way back when, but documenting success/failure per title so I later know what worked with what is tedious already and tinkering with the options is sometimes maddening. DOSBox is far easier - just set cycles and go...

And one day when any single component breaks (Sound blaster AWE32, Roland LAPC-1, PS/2 mouse and keyboard, PCI display controller, memory, motherboard... EVERYTHING is old junk)... well... it won't be trivial to get spares and who knows what the new piece of hardware requires settings-wise!

Anyway, I think I can hear a difference between MUNT and my LAPC-1 if I closely A/B music I know well, but in gaming it is nitpicking really and MUNT even has the advantage of playing through the kickass D/A I use in my (still "oldschool") home studio (should I so wish).

A/B is not really A/B when you hear right away from the background noise which is which :).

And even if there's a slight variation in a timbre, it might actually be for the emu, not against it... thing is, MUNT no longer messes event timings and such and in many ways it might well be more "musical" and is definitely more "clear" than the modules it emulates.

First I had this "mad idea" of a modular approach that would also benefit the Pandora: hooking the ISA-BUS LAPC-1 to a Pi (back then Pi1A)...It has actually been hooked to a laptop PC parallel port (ECP) already back in the early 90s! But somehow at this age (and offspringcount... ;-) I shiver at the amount of both electric and coding work to do... The LAPC-1 itself is really trivial to use as a module: give it power, signal the ISA reset pin and voila - you got a CM-32L (without SysEx response messages, though...).

Since then I've considered buying something Pi-like with enough oomph to properly run Munt but haven't found anything that would do it for sure.

Either way the midistream would flow from Pandora to "Da Box" wirelessly - bluetooth serial would be trivial as I've already transferred MIDI successfully over serial ports in Linux... but WLAN might also be OK , there are just practical issues with it. Getting audio routed back from "Da Box" is an issue (though I got a little battery powered pocket mixer from when I was young... but it is not convenient...).

If you solve the little hitches the later, Pi-like solution would also work for you PokeParadox, you'd just need to find a MUNT capable board, hopefully one that can run off a battery... according to messages I've read the Pi2 is not quite there CPU-wise yet!

But that companion would pretty much give you perfect Sierra/Lucasfilm experience and be portable too.

And of course I'm selfishly pitching this for you for my own benefit being as time-constrained as I am :).

Then again. the coming of small Atom tablets has shuffled the cards again and I'm now seriously considering a dual+ core Atom based Windows tablet for portable DOS gaming. I'm just unsure whether even a single Atom core (in a ~100 eur tablet, not monster one!) can handle MUNT.

But then I'm currently under the impression that in MUNT it is possible to achieve lower latencies in Linux than in Windows - I still, stupidly, would prefer it that I could use the "new MT-32"-solution as a synth too... In Windows MUNT has had just a bit too much latency for that to my tastes... So presumably a dedicated Linux box would be nicer in that sense...

Well... as every reader who even bothered further than the first paragraph has probably realized by now what the Pyra keyboard is for some forum members, the MT-32 (or more generally Roland's LA synths) is for me :).

I'm basically the guy who still listens to Enya's Watermark more to hear the D-50 than to hear the singing ;-).
 
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